Lovely bits already! I am rather enjoying getting to learn about all of your through your words. Quite a treat! Alright, here's a little scribble to get started:

Shakespeare's Awake!

"To sleep, perchance to dream…"
The adage that's age old,
But tell me please, Sir Shakespeare,
How long's that lie been sold?

Living dreams are better
Than any found in sleep;
'Tis why you burned your candle
While others counted sheep.

John, I just had to say the stout cat made me laugh out loud.

Why thank you, Gail. Drawn from life, I have to say. And putting him out doesn't have the required effect, I have to say. An old fool. Ah well, that makes two of us.

Baz - cricket at the Saint Lawrence Ground - and in the days of the tree! (I bet only Holly, thee and me get the allusion.) I wonder which school. Kent College - alma mater of Godfrey Evans?

Simon bloody Langton. But Evans – there was a fella, usually half-pissed.

The only rhyme I can find for 'insomnia' is the classical tag 'amor vincit omnia', love conquers all, don't you know. I suppose a bit too much of THAT might bring about insomnia but, so I'm told, the opposite is usually the case, at least in the case of the male.

Bazza, just down from the ground then. There exists somewhere a picture of the great Godfrey dressed as Carmen Miranda. There may have been better wicket-keepers, but how many of them could take a bet while cross-dressing? They don't make 'em like that any more.

Amor vincit omnia
And causes my insomnia.
I lie in bed
with splitting head.
Amor vincit Omnia.

The Mommas and the Pappas
Are at it like the clappers.
Instead of snooze
They hit the booze.
The Mommas and the Pappas.

You need your forty winks
So stow the fancy drinks
And too much bonk
Just makes you cronk.
You need your forty winks.

Not QUITE on the subject perhaps. Cronk is an Oz word, by the way. I am nothing if not cosmopolitan.

A nice bit of levity. I would add:

My head is full of rats.
My sleep's disturbed by cats.
My only hope
Is smoking dope.
My head is full of rats.

The old boys' Langton was in the centre of town, pretty much surrounded by bomb sites when I started there. When it was demolished Peter Watkins used it as ruined Budapest for a short film about the Hungarian uprising, The Forgotten Faces.

I've been awake for days,
To find a scheme that pays.
No sleep may come
Until I've won
The 'fiver' and the praise!

Wakey Wakey

The Kink is in his counting house the Queen is on the moon-
the Berlin Philharmonic lets me play a ragtime tune-
yippee yi yo ki yo ki yay an old cowhand begins to bay
and I forgot a bill to pay and ten thousand fans applaud the way
I scored a goal that won the day- a shoal of fish accept my fly-
for the umpteenth time I wonder why I did not have a neat reply
that would destroy pug head Molloy and in his place
put him and his ugly face looking like a half boiled shite
I'd answer now- I dwell a while on a winsome smile
that lit the night a girl I met with a lovely name
that I wholly forget and how did I a miss a chance like that
I wonder I wonder is she still the same is she gone to fat or what's she at
oh she was gorgeous -I think of a word that makes a rhyme and figure
how to fix a line- and then I think of what 'twill cost
to fix my car and friends I lost when lines were crossed.
Bernadette ! . And sleep is lost.

Thanks to Insomnia

While tossing and turning and yawning
all night till the morning is dawning

is something most people complain of
and tell you at length it's the bane of

their lives and will bore you to tears with
laments that they fill your poor ears with,

for those of us hearing them prattle
to fall fast asleep is no battle.

Their whining complaints are so boring,
in less than ten minutes we're snoring.

Nice to see you again, Jim, for the second time in a few days. I wondered whither you had wandered. I've been rolling your lines round my tongue - verfy fruity.